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Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen

Book by Bernard D. Beitman, MD · 2 quotes · Psychiatry, Psychology, Coincidence

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Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen Quotes

“The more than 2,500 respondents to the WCS that I constructed while at the University of Missouri reported that they “occasionally” experienced the pain of a loved one at a distance. In Stevenson’s review of 160 published simulpathity cases, one-third involved a parent and child. Friends and acquaintances were in- volved in about 28 percent. Husband and wife pairs were involved in about 14 per- cent and siblings about 15 percent. The similar relatively high percentages of par- ent-child and friend-acquaintance simulpathity suggests that emotional bonds, rather than genetic similarities, facilitate these interactions. Stevenson’s reports are well-documented by follow-up interviews with both the coincider and the people who witnessed the event. I decided to name this coincidence pattern simulpathity, from the Latin word simul, which means “simultaneous,” and the Greek root pathy, which means both “suffering” and “feeling,” as in the words sympathy and empathy. With sympathy (“suffering together”), the sympathetic person is aware of the suffering of the other. With simulpathity, the person involved is usually not consciously aware of the suffering of the other (except for those pairs with whom this shared pain is a regular occurrence). Only later is the simultaneity of the distress recognized. No explanatory mechanism is implied.”

PsychologyPsychiatrySyncronicitySimulpathity
Book:Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen
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“Birds may commemorate some human deaths. On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old security guard, killed fortynine people and wounded fifty-three others in a mass shooting inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Orlando Police Department officers shot and killed him after a three-hour standoff. In a subsequent vigil, the names of the forty-nine victims were being read as a flock of birds flew by. A photographer noticed them and snapped a photo. Later, she counted the birds in the photo. There were forty-nine. The photographer showed other people and asked them to count. “We were all stunned,” she said. A spokesman for the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, where the vigil was held, said that the center had not released the birds during the vigil. The mind was the collective and individual grief of the mourners of forty-nine deaths. The object was the forty-nine birds.”

PsychologyCoincidencePsychiatrySynchronicityOrlando Massacre
Book:Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen
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